


Mountains

by trashyeggroll



Series: Fictober 2019 [4]
Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: F/F, Fictober 2019, Fluff, Mini-adventure, RamVers, Requests, Tumblr Prompt, danbeau
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-08 06:30:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21231344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trashyeggroll/pseuds/trashyeggroll
Summary: Searching for ways to spend more time together, Carol brings Maria along on a random adventure.





	Mountains

**Author's Note:**

> Fictober Prompt #11: “It’s not always like this.”
> 
> Late! It's late! It's so late! I didn't edit it very well because it's late! Please forgive me.

There were precious few things in the cosmos that made Carol Danvers nervous. She could be _ scared, _ like when she thought she might not be able to save an innocent, and she could be _ uncomfortable, _ like the time she was offered accommodations by a species of sentient invertebrates and ended up sleeping in a wet, cold hole in the dirt.

But _ nervous _ mostly only came into play with one topic: Maria Rambeau.

Her sturdy-tempered pilot never truly gave her reason to, but Carol just couldn’t shake the antsy flutters in her stomach, the heat rising in her palms for distinctly un-superhero reasons—like when she closed the space between them for the first time since remembering her previous life, pressing her lips to Maria’s while her heart pounded against her ribcage. Maria had just kissed her back, then wrapped her strong arms around Carol’s shoulders. 

They certainly had their bumps along the road as partners, but that was to be expected, even for superheroes. The amount of time Carol spent away from home was a big one, which sounded so very _ human _ and predictably domestic outside of the moment, but hurt like a supernova when she was in it. 

One solution they’d agreed on to relieve some of the tension: Bringing Maria on some adventures, to planets or ships where she wouldn’t be in direct danger and had accommodations fit for human survival. Oxygen and heat were obvious requirements, but when Carol stepped into the room set up for Maria’s first off-world ride-along since the Skrulls, she found to her dismay that she’d forgotten air pressure. Her partner’s human body, strong as it was, would’ve exploded under the reading she got from the room, so that was a major renovation that delayed the experiment for a few Earth weeks. Monica would stay with a friend for the time, until they were confident in a process for her safety, as well as Maria’s. Carol’s biggest fear was that they would be targeted for their importance to Captain Marvel, so even though she was excited to open up more of this part of her life to her family, Carol was exceedingly concerned with picking the place and people that would almost guarantee success. 

The planet: Omicron 67, according to S.H.I.E.L.D. According to the locals, it was called, in a phonetic English translation, Pognosh.

The people: The pognoshi, a species of sentient, kangaroo-like bipeds. They stood about seven feet tall and had figured out the key to traveling faster than the speed of light two hundred years earlier. Most importantly, nearly all of them had the general temperament and demeanor of a Labrador retriever. 

And the date? Today, as it were, which was why Carol was nervously wringing her gloved hands together as she waited for Maria to join her by the ship’s airlock. She’d borrowed it from the Skrull and given it a good scrubdown, but spacegrime had a way of sticking around. Maria hadn’t made so much as a peep of complaint, of course, more interested in opening random panels to examine how the aliens built their birds. But Carol still felt jumpy and off-center, sure that _ something _ would go horribly wrong and they’d have to abandon their plans. 

Thumping boots interrupted the blonde’s pacing, and she looked up to see her partner somewhat clunkily approaching in her spacesuit. It’d taken a lot of wrangling to get that, too, but she’d spared no expense. Crafted from a hodgepodge of Kree technology, it was a far sleeker affair than the Michelin Man suits still worn by Earth’s astronauts—silver-green in color, the metal plates connected by tubes and wiring.

“How do I look?” asked her partner, her tone playful, but tinny through the suit speaker. 

Carol smiled as Maria stopped in front of her and changed the reflective factor of the helmet, allowing the blonde to see her face. She’d seen the expression there on their daughter’s face so many times, when they set off fireworks or when she talked about aliens. Awed, excited. Fearless.

“I’m just sad I won’t be able to kiss you all day,” replied Carol, tilting her head. 

“Make it up to me later.” Maria blew her a kiss through the tempered glass, and Carol obligingly caught it and delivered it via a palm to her cheek. “Okay, we doing this or not, Danvers?”

Huffing, Carol reached for the airlock lever, and they stepped inside to wait for the vacuum closure to engage. She took in a sharp breath before pulling the next lever and opening the exodoor. Orange light spilled across the metal floor as the first crack between the doors opened, and Carol watched her partner’s face shine even brighter at the unfolding landscape. 

The pognoshi lived on a planet made almost entirely of grasslands, and their water source was comprised of huge lakes, as big as a sea on Earth, but landlocked from one another. From a few light years away, the planet looked like a yellow-green cottage cheese. 

“Welcome!” shouted the leader of the pognoshi, Emperor Skalosh, waving his gnarled staff, topped with some kind of glittering blue gemstone, just like they’d rehearsed. He’s got a big smile on his long, fuzzy face, which is slightly disconcerting, but still endearing. “To our humble planet.”

Introductions included the pognoshi listing the names, titles, and important family history of twelve members of the Emperor’s court… it was, of course, excruciatingly boring and largely unintelligible, but harmless cultural traditions were a small price to pay to win a comparatively huge amount of trust with any species.

Once that business was concluded, the Emperor led them on a tour of the planet’s capitol. They built stone walls for their buildings, but since it didn’t rain much, all the roofs were made of thatched sawgrass, giving everything a somewhat old-timey look... except that, above the squat houses and businesses, the pognoshi glided around invisible pathways, to and fro, going about their days. It was an effect made possible through a combination of the low-pressure atmosphere, strong winds, and the planet’s intense magnetic polarization. Whatever the case, the effect was objectively stunning, if not also absurd. There were giant kangaroos surfing on air above their heads, and even if Carol was used to flying, she was usually the only one up in the air. 

The swirling skyways allowed the pognoshi to keep their structures horizontal while still being able to travel where they needed to go in a reasonable amount of time, which interestingly resulted in a society that didn’t have any sort of rural/urban divide. There were no cities, just one, a massively expansive settlement that covered nearly half the planet. One problem that arose from such a setup was that land was very expensive, and in the less affluent neighborhoods, the overhanging grasses of roofs touched one another. But, every society had their ills, big and small.

By design, neither inter-species or intra-species conflict had prompted Carol to pick the pognoshi mission for Maria’s first. Nay, no supervillain stalked the planet’s grasslands… She was, instead, there to help them with a rather oversized pest problem. In the weeks they’d spent preparing human-safe spaces, Carol had intermittently been attending to that task, but by nature, it took several “treatments”.

Lunch was completely vegetarian and included a smorgasbord of savory stews, sweet-glazed cakes, and hearty, seeded breads, which they ate in the ship so Maria could take off her helmet. Next, Carol and the Emperor brought Maria to the pognoshi command center, which looked like a giant security office, complete with pognoshi warriors wielding fifteen-foot spears. They didn’t have guns, as combat technology had never been their focus, but they did have a suite of defense controls that helped keep unwelcome visitors out of their atmosphere. 

Except for the invasive species Carol sought to eradicate: the buffalo worm, or nashbog to the locals. 

With Captain Marvel’s help, they’d finally dwindled the population of root-eating bugs enough to find their nest, underneath one of the planet’s rare, thin mountain ranges. She flew there now, with the Emperor and Maria in her ear, watching on holographic screens back at the capitol. Her previous scuffles with the creatures hadn’t left so much as a scratch on Carol, but she knew too well that things could go wrong in an instant, and having her partner watch all this was exactly type of distraction that aided chaos. 

So, she tried to focus on her plan, and not impressing Maria, as she stopped over the mountains, letting her helmet’s scanners search for a nest entrance. If she concentrated, Carol’s superhuman ears could pick up the sound of movement underneath the dirt, a sickly wet sort of sliding noise, undergirded by a deeper rumble, probably worms digging deeper. 

“You just gonna look?”

Carol paused, allowing herself a smile as she answered Maria’s smug tone, “It’s called strategizing.”

“You? Since when?” laughed Maria, her voice clear and warm now that it was coming directly from her helmet to Carol’s.

It was a joke, part of the natural mission banter that started long before their romance—but heat tugged at Carol’s chest, because she did have a real answer for that, and the blonde lowered her tone to calmly reply, “Since I remembered that I’ve got a couple someones to go home to.”

A long pause followed, and just before Carol started to wonder if the comms had been cut, she heard a soft, watery laugh, and Maria finally answered: “Keep that sweet talk handy for later. Be safe out there, babe.”

“Always.” 

Carol sucked in a breath before diving toward the earth like a falcon tucking its wings to strike, fists extended in front of her, and she unleashed a torrent of ultrahot energy as she hit the ground. Dirt parted and disintegrated around her knuckles, boulders melted away as she bolted through them like a knife through butter, and in a few lucky instances, she felt and heard the splatter of buffalo worms rended in two by her trajectory. She made a few loop-de-loops and sharper turns, and then burst back through the surface, hovering a few dozen yards in the air as the ground shook and crumbled, caving the tunnels dug by the creatures that were now spilling to the surface, screeching and howling like stuck boars. 

Buffalo worms fed primarily on plant roots, meaning they were slowly but surely wiping out the dainty crops that fed the pognoshi and the grasses that oxygenated the atmosphere, but they indulged in the occasional live prey, especially weaker pognoshi and children who strayed too close to a foraging worm (they were not, as Carol had been snippily corrected on her first day, called “joeys”). The typical adult nashbog was twelve feet long and about half that wide, for all intents and purposes essentially purple and red versions of the creatures from the _ Tremors _ movies. Those weren’t much worry to Carol; even when they swarmed, she could easily avoid their snapping teeth or hold their jaws open, and a solid blast of energy tended to be more than enough to kill them quickly. It was the queen of the nest that worried her. 

She dispatched most of the creatures within a few minutes, but then they began retreating, and Carol watched the center of the crater she’d made begin to rise. 

“Uhhh, Carol…” she heard Maria say as the queen rose from the dirt, seemingly endlessly, no less than ten times bigger than its worker drones.

“I got it, it’s fine.” Carol could tell her voice went higher than usual on the attempt at reassurance, but she shook it off and zipped higher into the sunny sky, easily rolling out of the way of a spray of acid from the queen. “Not a big deal. That substance won’t burn through my suit.”

She shouldn’t have said it. The cosmos must have heard her—because the queen turned and seemed to sniff the air, and then she dove underground again, leaving a river of upturned earth in her wake. It was headed straight for the capitol.

“Carol?” came the Emperor’s voice, confused and concerned. 

“I got it!” Carol answered quickly, and then she dove into the dirt after the queen, which was moving impressively quickly towards the city. “All good, folks. I got her.”

She managed to get one gloved hand on the tip of the creature’s pointed tail end, but to her annoyance, her fingers sank uselessly into the sticky brown flesh and then slid off, covered in hissing acid. Not a one-hand job, then. 

“You’re about halfway back to the city line,” warned Maria, her voice strong. “You okay down there?”

“I can’t get my hands on it, literally.”

“We can’t see you down there. What’s your plan, Danvers?”

“Hold on,” grunted Carol as she made a move, knowing she was out of time. With a swimmer’s kick that set off an explosion behind her, Carol jetted forward, a barracuda through clear blue surf, over the creature, and then slammed her whole body down—and down, and down, even as they kept moving forward, pushing the queen so far into the ground that they hit bedrock and smashed through it, with the worm taking the brunt of that force. 

“Carol? Car—an—me?” Maria’s voice fizzled and died out, the signal muffled by miles of dirt, and Carol let go of the buffalo worm with one final shove before rocketing back to the surface. 

“I think I got it,” panted the blonde as she burst into the sunlight again, finding herself within a stone’s throw of the capitol, close enough to make out Maria standing in a window. “I’m okay.”

“That was messy,” laughed her partner, waving from the building. “Gave me a little scare.”

“Well, I’m definitely going to need to take a shower befor—“

A geyser of stone and dirt exploded out of the ground to interrupt her, and then came the massive snapping jaws of the queen worm, splattered with black blood. It erupted with enough force that the thing’s entire body went airborne, and if it hadn’t been breathtakingly terrifying, it would’ve been mesmerizing—a great white shark flying out of the sea. Except a million times more deadly.

The queen’s body arced, and it began tipping towards the capitol, on a course to smash the command center.

Carol’s mind was racing for a solution. She delivered a solid punch to the thing’s side mid-air, knocking it clear of the building, but couldn’t keep a tight enough hold on it to prevent the queen from twisting away. 

“Babe, listen to me,” Maria was saying in her ear. “That thing _ lives _ underground. You won’t defeat it there. But it doesn’t belong in the sky. Do you _ read me, _Carol?”

“I read you,” huffed the blonde, brushing some dirt off her chestplate. “I got it. Get everyone inside and away from the windows. All of them.” 

She couldn’t grip and hold the queen by her skin, but when Carol jetted down under the thing and zipped straight up, the worm was heavy enough to leverage against her upturned hands. Acid and foul-smelling blood leaked down her arms and onto her helmet, flesh sagging against her head under the weight of the creature—but it screeched and howled and couldn’t escape as Captain Marvel carried it into the sky. The buffalo worms could handle the low pressure on the surface of the planet, but it didn’t take long for the _ extremely _ low pressure of the upper atmosphere to begin to take effect. 

Carol roared with the effort of continuing their rise as the queen swelled and writhed, and then finally they seemed to hit a breakpoint—the screeching got quieter, and the skin against her hands began to shrivel. A few more miles, and the sounds stopped, and the worm shrank, hardening and crackling with ice. So Carol turned, letting go of the carcass, and flew around to the top as it fell, controlling the descent as best she could. 

As the sound of alarms grew louder, Carol just hoped no one was in the way—when they hit the ground near the edge of the command center, a tidal wave of dirt rose in front of them, smashing through windows and sending acidic blood splashing in all directions. 

It took a long time for the dust to settle. Carol knelt on the dead, flattened worm, panting hard and wondering how she could’ve so egregiously underestimated this thing—but as soon as the silence struck her, all she could think was _ Maria. _ She leapt to her feet and called out, once, twice, and waited.

“We’re okay.”

Carol spun on her heel, heart leaping in her chest as she spotted Maria digging herself out of a pile of dirt, with the Emperor doing the same nearby. The blonde sprinted to her, burning away the acid with her fire—thankfully, there wasn’t much where they had been buried, and the two looked more or less unharmed. 

“Jesus,” sighed Carol as her arms folded around Maria’s broad shoulders, squeezing her partner as hard as she dared. “That was too close. I’m sorry.”

“Are you—“ Maria sucked in a breath when Carol let her go, panicked at the strain in her voice. “Are you kidding me? That’s the most fun I’ve had since you brought aliens to the house.”

Carol just shook her head and captured Maria’s lips in a kiss, heedless of the gritty dirt covering them both. 

Her heart rate didn’t go back to normal until hours later. The pognoshi were overjoyed to be free of the worms—the stragglers would die off without their queen—and didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the destruction. Carol and Maria took showers in the ship before returning to join the Council for a celebratory dinner, and then took an early leave to find the cabin Carol had so painstakingly designed for them. 

All her tedious hours, wasted. This trip was supposed to be a baby step, and right out of the gate, Carol had instead put Maria in danger, nearly squished by a giant slug. The disappointment opened a chasm somewhere in her chest, a feeling skirting along hopelessness. She wanted so badly to spend more time with her partner and their daughter, but how would they, if even the most basic mission could go _ so _ wrong?

“Earth to Carol.”

The tornado of her thoughts dissipated to give way to the present at the sound of said partner’s voice. Carol looked up, finding Maria looking at her with eyes rounded with affection, and she reflexively smiled, in spite of her worries. “What?”

“You tell me. I had a great time today, and I didn’t make a single ‘kangaroo court’ joke at your friends.”

As always, since the day they met, Maria’s smooth voice and joking tone made Carol’s nerves dwindle further, until she could return a smile and let the tension melt out of her shoulders. She hoped Maria understood she meant it in many different ways when she replied, “Thank you.”

Without realizing it, Carol had walked them a little past their sleeping quarters, but they quickly arrived at the metallic, disco-ball shaped structure. It looked ridiculous amongst the low pognoshi huts, but it would keep a human alive outside a suit, and Carol was more than ready to be able to kiss her partner whenever she felt like it once again. She opened the door and engaged the pressure generators, which also kicked on the lights. The spherical room had a large bed and a bureau of drawers, pognoshi-sized, plus a white sink and showerhead behind a wooden folding screen. 

Maria groaned with relief as she slid off each piece of her spacesuit, haphazardly tossing them in a pile while Carol’s hands followed the exposed human form, massaging her arms, shoulders, and legs. She ended up kneeling in front of her partner, thumbs working out the knots in her feet as Maria made noises that suggested they might be doing something else entirely in their little private room. 

They were both exhausted from the day’s excitements, and the two women fell into the bed, legs tangled and Carol crawling close to rest her head in the crook of Maria’s shoulder. It was objectively much better than flopping onto a pognoshi straw-stuffed bed, alone—she was warm, and she felt safe, and the woman she loved was breathing softly next to her.

“So, what do you think?” 

The words came from just above her head, and Carol let her eyes slip closed to help her brain focus on an answer. “I dunno. You could’ve gotten hurt today.”

Maria shifted her arm under Carol’s shoulders, curling it around to hold her a little tighter. “I could’ve gotten hurt on Earth today.”

“But you’re here because of me.”

“Because I _ want _ to be.”

This time, Carol sighed and craned her neck up to look at her partner, whose expression was a very familiar, very stubborn one. “You know what I mean.”

“Maybe Monica doesn’t come along until she’s an adult, but… I know I’m not the most powerful woman in the universe, but as far as humans go, I’m pretty sturdy.”

Her tone lifted towards the end, and Carol chuckled through overwhelmed tears stinging at her eyes, torn between her need to protect the people she loved and her love for Maria Rambeau. “It’s not always like this. Sometimes, people die. Sometimes a lot of them do.”

“I know. And I know how heavy you carry it. Let me help you, when I can. Okay?” 

Carol just nodded, and Maria kissed her forehead until the worried lines smoothed away.

After a few more minutes of enjoying the warm quiet together, Carol snapped out of nearly falling asleep when she remembered the special design she’d built into their quarters. Sitting up and ignoring her partner’s questioning whine, she pulled a small black box from her bag. With one click of the remote, the room gave a small tremble, and she turned to smirk at her confused partner before pressing the next button. The metal pieces that covered the structure retracted into themselves, leaving behind a honeycomb of windows, and the lights dimmed.

Maria swung her legs over the side of the bed and stumbled closer, breathing out a low gasp. Their sphere was floating above the planet, still rising, until the lights below were nothing but flecks of orange against deep brown. It took them over the nearest mountain range, where Carol stopped it and joined her wife by the windows. Out here, away from the vast pognoshi nation, only the moon lit the ridges and valleys below. Carol had picked this spot because it looked so much like the mountains they used to fly together, all those years ago. Before all this. 

She knew Maria recognized it too by the shine in her deep brown eyes, and her partner’s voice was hoarse as she asked, “Can anyone see us in here?”

“No, it’s one-way and—“

Maria cut her off by seizing the front of her shirt with both hands, dragging the blonde forward until their lips met and holding her close. 

Whatever her nervousness, Carol’s worries were being kissed away, and she supposed that she could concede on it being a good day—Maria made a very persuasive argument. 

**Author's Note:**

> yell at me on tumblr [@trashyeggroll](https://trashyeggroll.tumblr.com/)


End file.
